Friday, January 07, 2011

The "How Up to Date is Your Blog" game

One of the consequences of generally waiting till games fall in price is that I am usually a few months behind the curve when it comes to blogging about them. That gave me the idea of trying to put a more scientific measure on just how up to date (or out of touch) is my blog. The process turned out to be relatively easy and you can apply it to you own blog if you like:

1. Look at all the posts you have made in the last month (if you are a very prolific poster you can limit it to your ten most recent entries).
2. For each post try to pick a date in time when this particular post would have been a "hot topic" worthy of front page placement on a major blog or news site. Wikipedia is handy for finding release dates while Google's "timeline" view (probably hidden under "more search tools") is also very useful. Remember that we are only considering timeliness here, not writing quality.
3. Once you have the "timeliness" dates of you most recent entries then just fire them into a spreadsheet and get the average to see how up to date your blog is.

Anything less than 1 month and I reckon your blog is a pretty up to date source of news.

The 18th of February 2009! My blog is almost two years behind the times!. To be fair the results are skewed a bit by the 2006 date I put in for the Gogle article but whatever way you look at it "Life is a Mindbending Puzzle" isn't going to win any prizes for being up to date.

3 comments:

I think it's something of a false analogy. After all we have a hobby where the major games are WoW (2004), Eve (2003), Lotro (2006?) and Everquest 2 (2004). We're not really a cutting edge bunch of people.